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MY REVIEW
I have always enjoyed books written by Lori Copeland. She's been writing for a long time and she never fails with a good premise, good story line, and good character development. This is another winner.

Mae has been cooking for her man for six years every week, but he can't seem to come around to ask the all important question. She keeps hoping. Then there is her very sweet neighbor Pauline who is suffering from old age dementia. She can't take care of her, and her job, and her brother, too, so she finds the name of Tom Curtis in Pauline's desk and writes to him thinking he is her nephew.

Tom can't remember anything about an Aunt Pauline, but since he had no family to ask, she just might be his aunt. In response to Mae's desperate appeals, and since he worked for the railroad, he decided to pay a visit to this end-of-the-line town in North Dakota.

Thus, a tangle of romance and treachery begins. The ending isn't surprising, but is very satisfying, especially when God's providence is glorified rather than man's enterprise. The storyline is uncomplicated, and so it's a fast read for a Sunday afternoon. No nail-biting, but plenty of succinct description that gives you the exact flavor of the countryside and of the town, but not over powering so that you have to skip paragraphs or pages to get back to the story.

Lori lives in the beautiful Ozarks with her husband Lance. Lance and Lori have three sons, three daughter-in-laws, and six wonderful grandchildren, and two great-granddaughters. Lance and Lori are very involved in their church, and active in supporting mission work in Mali, West Africa.

Lori began her writing career in 1982, writing for the secular book market. In 1995, after many years of writing, Lori sensed that God was calling her to use her gift of writing to honor Him. It was at that time that Lori began writing for the Christian book market. To date, she has had over 100 books published.

ABOUT THE BOOK

A romantic new book from bestselling author Lori Copeland that portrays God’s miraculous provision even when none seems possible.

1892—Mae Wilkey’s sweet next-door neighbor, Pauline, is suffering from old age and dementia and desperately needs family to come help her. But Pauline can’t recall having kin remaining. Mae searches through her desk and finds a name—Tom Curtis, who may just be the answer to their prayers.

Tom can’t remember an old aunt named Pauline, but if she thinks he’s a long-lost nephew, he very well may be. After two desperate letters from Mae, he decides to pay a visit. An engagement, a runaway train, and a town of quirky, loveable people make for more of an adventure than Tom is expecting. But it is amazing what can bloom in winter when God is in charge of things.

Saturday

So you've got a book
coming out and the marketing director at your publisher calls you up, very
excited about your book.

You're excited too, until she tells you all
the things she wants you to do to promote your book.

Put up a web
site. Create a blog. Make a Facebook fan page and hang out there. Get active
on Google Plus. Starting tweeting. Build an e-mail list. Get on Goodreads.
Print bookmarks. Speak at libraries. Do book-signings. Run a contest and give
away a new Kindle.

And on and on.

About now, you're probably
wondering when you're supposed to find the time to do all this stuff when
you have a day job AND you're trying to write your next book.

The
first thing to remember is that when a marketing director gives you a laundry
list like this, sheprobably knows very well that it's really just a
menu.

You don't go to a restaurant and order everything on the menu.
You order a couple of dishes and leave the rest for next time.

By the
same token, you're going to choose one or two things on your marketing
director's menu to focus on. The rest, you're going to do badly or not at
all.

She'll probably be very pleased if you execute even one of these
really well.

She'll probably be very displeased if you make
a half-hearted stab at every single suggestion and end up doing all of
them badly.

How do you decide what to do and what to leave
undone?

Many authors seem completely unable to answer this question.
So they do whatever their instincts tell them, or they do what a friend told
them to do, or they do nothing at all.

I learned a simple principle
from my friend, marketing guru Perry Marshall. Perry likes to divide up all
the work you COULD be doing into rough categories based on how much they
earn you:

* Ten dollars per hour work * Hundred dollars per hour
work * Thousand dollars per hour work

These are broad categories.
"Ten-dollar" work is anything that earns you between three and
thirtydollars per hour.

Here's an important principle that will save
you mountains of grief: If you have all the hundred-dollar work that you
can handle, then don't do any ten-dollar work unless you absolutely have to
(or unless you love it). Instead, hire somebody to do it for
you.

Likewise, if you have plenty of ten-dollar work, then don't take
on one-dollar tasks, unless you have to (or unless you REALLY love
them).

Believe it or not, authors violate this principle ALL the
time.

One big problem writers have is that they can't easily tell
the difference between ten-dollar work andhundred-dollar work. How do you
know what your work is earning you?

Let's start with the easy things,
which are writing and speaking.

Suppose you know that you can write a
novel in 500 hours and your last advance was $5,000. These are typical
numbers early in a writing career. Then writing a novel is worth about ten
dollars per hour to you.

Later in your career, you might be earning
$50,000 per book, and now writing a novel is hundred-dollar work. Nice, if
you can get it!

Likewise, it's not hard to compute your hourly rate
for doing public speaking. Generally, you'll get paid an honorarium for
this, and you can also sell books at the back of the room. It won't take very
many speaking engagements to figure out what your actual pay rate
is.

But what about all those other tasks you're supposed to do?
How much does hanging out on Facebook earn you? What about Twittering? Or
maintaining your blog?

It's hard to say for sure, but here you can
harness your good common-sense instincts. (Most authors are cheapskates,
so let's put that to work.) Suppose that somebody offered to do all your
Twitter work for you. How much would you be willing to pay per hour for
them to do that? A dollar an hour? Five? Ten?

I suspect that very few
authors would be willing to pay a hundred dollars per hour for somebody to
tweet for them. I doubt many authors would pay even ten dollars an hour.
I'll bet most authors wouldn't pay more than a dollar an
hour.

Whatever number you'd be willing to pay, that's probably a
decent estimate of its actual value to you.If you've got the common sense of
an anthill, you aren't going to overpay or underpay very much.

Suppose
you decide that you couldn't possibly pay more than a dollar an hour to hire
somebody to Twitter on your behalf. This means that Twittering is
probably only earning you a dollar an hour.

Now here's the simple
question: If you have an extra hour in your day, should you spend it
Twittering or writing? If writing earns you even ten dollars an hour, then
this is a no-brainer. For you, it makes more sense to write than to tweet.

One caveat: If you like to hang out on Twitter and you'd do it for
free, then there's no harm in doing so when you're not working. But call it
what it is -- entertainment, not work.

You may be thinking, "But what
about all the intangibles of marketing? Spending time on Twitter
orFacebook keeps my name in the front of people's minds. It keeps me in
the conversation. That's good."

That may be true. Those pesky intangible
values may be very significant. But be honest with yourself. How
much would you be willing to pay for them? That's the best indicator of
their real value to you. If you think it would be worth paying somebody $1000
per hour to gain those intangibles, then do it yourself. If you
wouldn't pay ten cents per hour to do the job, then why in theworld would
you do it yourself?

You can apply this same kind of thinking to just
about any marketing activity your marketing director throws at you. How
much would you pay somebody per hour to do this task in your stead?

If
that number is very much less than you'd earn from writing, then it probably
makes much more sense to do the writing, not the marketing. If you can
hire somebody to do the marketing for less than the rate you'd demand,
then it probably makes sense to pay them to do it.

If the number is
very much more than what you'd earn from your writing, then do the
marketing.

You can use this principle to figure out how to say yes and
how to say no on just about any required task that comes your
way.

What about optional tasks? Does the same
calculation apply?

Yes, but there's another decision to make for
optional tasks -- the decision whether to just leave it undone. That's a
simple decision.

If you can find somebody to do it for less than
you're willing to pay, then hire them. Otherwise, don't worry about it
because it's just not worth it to you.

There are a zillion ways to
market your book. Your marketing director knows you can't do them all.
Make her happy and do at least one of them really well. Make yourself
happy and do only the ones that are worth it to you.

This article is reprinted by permission of the author.

Award-winning
novelist Randy Ingermanson, "theSnowflake Guy," publishes the Advanced
Fiction WritingE-zine, with more than 29,000 readers, every month. Ifyou
want to learn the craft and marketing of fiction,AND make your writing more
valuable to editors, ANDhave FUN doing it, visithttp://www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com.

Download
your free Special Report on Tiger Marketingand get a free 5-Day Course in
How To Publish a Novel.

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God's Blessing

About Me

My first love is using my
God-given talent to shine a light in a dark world, and I am so committed to
bringing God glory with my editing and my own writing. We are always looking for good authors at Christian Publishing House. I am a weekly columnist for Studylight.org and monthly contributor at LivingBetter50.com Each column comes out on Sundays at LiveAsIf.org for Studylight. Check them out.